Corporate governance strength and stock market liquidity in Malaysia

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate governance strength on stock market liquidity in an emerging country, namely, Malaysia, by constructing a corporate governance score that captures both internal monitoring mechanisms (board of directors’ characteristics, audit committee’s characteristics and internal audit function) and external monitoring mechanism (audit quality).

The study uses a sample of 2,020 yearly firm observations in Bursa Malaysia over the period 2009-2012. The ordinary least square regression and several estimation methods such as two-stage least squares using instrumental variables (IV-2SLS) and dynamic GMM are employed.

This study finds a significant positive association between corporate governance effectiveness and stock market liquidity. The finding is robust to alternative liquidity measurements, to alternative estimation methods, and to endogeneity bias.

This result implies that the firms with effective monitoring mechanisms mitigate information asymmetry which leads to less adverse selection problems among traders.

This study provides implications for regulators to help design regulations that enhance stock market liquidity. This study could also help investors and traders to formulate their trading decisions, and enables firms to know the importance of strengthening the corporate governance monitoring mechanisms.

This study constructs a corporate governance effectiveness measure by combining both internal and external monitoring mechanisms. These mechanisms have not been constructed together in one score in the corporate governance literature and the impact of internal audit function, as an internal monitoring mechanism on liquidity, has yet to be examined.